Unity

We all know that Video is one of the biggest trends of the last years in mobile gaming. Now there is a study that confirms it. Unity recently put together a report based mainly on surveys of users and game makers. The report shows how dominant Video ads are today and the trend seems to get stronger even.

Key points from the in-game advertising report:

71% of the users said they prefer Video Ads as the way to ‘pay’ for the game

After adding rewarded video – 86% of developers saw increase or no change in IAP, 68% saw increase or no change in retention and only 14% saw any negative impact at all

When surveying studios of 5 to 20 people – 90% said they are adding rewarded video ads in their next title

You can download the full report here (after filling out a signup form).

Interpretation of the video ads report

This report demonstrates a trend we are all aware of and was covered in a recent article in this blog – More ads in mobile games. Unity is making an effort to highlight the trend as their advertising business is becoming a substential part of their business and they are positioned as one of the key players in the video space. This is the reason behind them investing in such a report.

For developers, I believe most of them know already about the availability of rewarded video so there is no big news here.

Related – video ad LTV attribution

With the trend of advertising becoming a significant part of mobile app revenues it is important to start measuring ad LTV more precisely. Today most game publishers divide the daily ad revenue by the daily active users to reach ARPDAU number. However this method assumes all users are the same and each user is contributing the average amount of revenue. In reality, some users are interacting more with the ads, clicking and installing the advertised apps. Since mobile campaigns today are mostly paying on CPI basis, there is a big difference in ad revenues between different users in the app. Accurately calculating the LTV per user, cohort and segment is becoming a key skill for game developers these days.

With 2016 come new SOOMLA dashboard features. We’re excited to release our God Mode Analytics plus two new integrations with Facebook and UnityIAP.

God Mode Analytics

Our newest feature in the dashboard lets you discover analytics of other games in the GROW network! You can search for games that are similar to yours and actually see their metrics and overlapping user behavior. You can see other game’s analytics in ranges, however, the game itself remains anonymous. Finding games is easy using our tag-based search. Just start typing in the search bar and select the tags you’d like to search for. You can see the full list of tags in our tags dictionary.

Mutual Discovery

An important part of God Mode Analytics is keeping games anonymous. If, however, you find a game that you are particularly interested in, you can send that game a “Reveal” request. The developer of that game can then approve your request. Once the connection is made, fellow developers can see each others’ studio name, game name and game icon, as well as precise numbers instead of ranges in each others’ analytics. Mutual discovery is time limited, allowing you to explore your friend’s game (given their approval) for one week, one month or a full year.

God Mode Analytics coupled with Mutual Discovery opens a whole new opportunity for data-driven game design. With knowledge of what’s working for others, and what your users particularly do in other games, you can enhance and optimize your current game, or build the next one with new insights.

You can also find games that are super successful and decide that your new game will be similar, it’s always good to develop something you know people will like.

Integrations

GROW for Facebook

If you’re already working with the Facebook SDK for Unity in your game and want to add GROW to start collecting analytics about social events, all you have to do is import the GROW Facebook integration from the Integrations page.

You’ll be directed to a page with the integration steps:
1. Download the package.

2. Import it to your Unity project. 3. Open the GROW settings. 4. Now copy & paste the Game and Environment Keys from the integration page to your project.5. Add the prefabs simply by clicking the button in the panel. And you’re done, just build and run your app to start working with GROW Analytics!

GROW for UnityIAP

If you want to add GROW to your project and you’re already working with UnityIAP the integration is super simple – just like the Facebook integration. Go to the dashboard integrations page and import the UnityIAP for GROW package. From here the steps are exactly like the Facebook integration – fast and simple, enjoy!

As always, if you have any comments, ideas or questions we’d love to hear about them, just drop us a line 🙂

Wanna see it before you try it? Check out our demo video to learn more about GROW and God Mode Analytics.

Unity Prefabs

Remember those SOOMLA Prefabs you were required to drag & drop into your main scene in order to receive and handle events? Well, they’re gone!

You now have a new way of initializing event listeners without those prefabs – by dynamically creating the game objects in runtime.

The new event system is available from the following versions:

Core v1.2.0+

Store v1.9.0+

Profile v2.2.0+

LevelUp v1.1.0+

Ever had problems updating SOOMLA?

That’s why we released a new version and we now have a script to easily remove SOOMLA from Unity, in order to add an updated version straight away. This change makes the whole process of updating SOOMLA much simpler and saves you time – you even have an option to remove and update only a specific module.

Are all your SOOMLA packages up to date?

There’s a new script that makes sure that all your packages are up to date, if they’re not you’re notified and all you have to do is click the link displayed, in the Unity Editor, and you’ll be downloading the latest version in no time!

A Few More Improvements

SYNC – Our Sync process has been fixed and improved and now the user’s balance is always synced between different devices.

HIGHWAY – energy consumption has been improved to prolong battery life.

God Mode Analytics – see analytics of other games similar to yours and compare overlapping user behavior.

We’re constantly working on improving our products, drop us a line if you have any comments or special requests.

The wait is finally over! We’re excited to release the first version of SOOMLA Store for Windows Phone 8, now available on Github. For those of you who’ve already used SOOMLA, this new plugin will be a walk in the park. Keeping consistent with the other platforms we support, WP8 utilizes our rich economy model, event system, encrypted on-device storage, user balance management and Windows Store billing all baked in. And for those of you who are new to SOOMLA, have a look at our Github repo’s README while we’re diligently working on WP8 documentation for our knowledge base.

SOOMLA Store WP8 provides a “Test Mode” for your IAPs. You will be able to check the purchase flow before publishing, making the tests easier and increasing the quality of your app. It also runs on the simulator (as it support x86 build), is compatible with WP8.1 and is W10 ready.

To cater Unity devs, we’ve also included Windows Phone 8 support in Unity. All you need to do is select WP8 as your build target. You can also use the simulation checkboxes during testing.

Windows Phone is emerging as an attractive platform to be in. While device distribution is still significantly lower than iPhones and Android devices, the audience of Windows Phone is a loyal one. The Windows Phone Store hit more than 500,000 apps last year which is an impressive growth rate and actually beats the growth percentage of the App Store which was launched several years before.

We’d like to pay our respect to the guys at Shinypix studio for helping us make Windows Phone another platform supported by the SOOMLA framework. Their dedication and work on this project is the true epitome of open source technology.

We’re happy to announce that the SOOMLA Store SDK now supports receipt validation for Android. This latest development, which was much awaited by our developer community, is another layer in our secure in-app purchase stack which supports our commitment to prevent IAP fraud. The validation uses our dedicated complimentary server. Don’t sweat it if you don’t know how to set up a server, we’ll pick up the tab on that one.

This latest feature has also been integrated into our Unity and Cocos2d-x plugins to ensure that developers using game engines can benefit from it as well. In Unity, using Android receipt validation is as easy as ticking a checkbox. You need to also configure a few things with Google and provide your OAuth credentials. This is explained in-depth in our knowledge base.

Developers using GROW analytics gain automatic access to our fraud protection analytics. Our analytics integration does not use custom based events and is able to filter out fraud to give you more accurate reporting.

Receipt validation, also known as server side verification, is a best practice for developers who are employing in-app purchases in their game and who isn’t today, right? For those of you who aren’t familiar with receipt validation, the general concept is to double check a transaction with a third party server which in turn validates it with Google Play’s servers. The reasoning for do this is that malicious users could potentially “crack” their devices’ IAP by installing a piece of software that emulates the purchase process. These crackers usually hijack purchase requests and direct them to fraudulent servers that return a response similar to the one returned by Google Play even though the transaction is never really committed. The solution to this scenario is to validate the receipt that’s returned at the end of the purchase with a dedicated server that you trust, which will validate the receipt on your behalf with Google Play. Since it’s your dedicated server (or in this case, SOOMLA’s dedicated server) it’s much harder to crack the link between that server and Google Play. This process is very similar to receipt validation in iOS.

Users like videos. It’s no coincidence that video game has the word video in it. From video ads to video sharing – videos are essential to user retention. They keep users entertained, engaged, and interested. Videos will improve your game’s fun-factor and bring in more loyal users. Let’s take a look at 10 Unity Video Plugins that can make this happen.

Kamcord allows users to record game play and share it on social media. Their website displays featured videos that come from games using Kamcord. In July 2013, Trial Xtreme, a game using Kamcord had 139 million recordings and 122,000 videos shared on social media. Notable games with Kamcord include My Talking Tom and Clash of Clans.

Price

Supported Platforms

Category

Free

Video Recording

Unity acquired Everyplay from Applifier in 2014. Much like Kamcord, Everyplay allows users to record game play and share on social media. Users enjoy sharing these videos with friends in order to encourage them to begin playing the game. The possibility for extra exposure on social media means developers can receive more free organic installs. More installs means more revenue for developers. Notable games using Everyplay include Bad Piggies, Pixel Gun 3D, and Geometry Dash. Everyplay also intends to launch an online community with discussions, videos, and video discovery this fall.

Price

Supported Platforms

Category

$75

Texture

Prime 31 offers a video plugin called LiveTexture. This integration allows developers to use videos as textures for different objects in games. The video can be pre-defined or come directly from the user’s camera. The possibility for camera usage means developers can create augmented reality style game plays using LiveTexture.

Price

Supported Platforms

Category

$45

Texture

Easy Movie Texture is a more affordable solution to do what LiveTexture can do. It does not explicitly include a live camera texture, but it does support .mp4 playback on Android. Developers can select the time a video will start playing, customize the dimension of the video and set it as a texture for objects in a game. This tool is useful for developers that want to create cross platform games that utilize dynamic textures. The use for this plugin can range from placing a TV in a game to having a video texture simulate a changing sky. Developers can find creative ways to use this plugin to create engaging games.

Price

Supported Platforms

Category

$25

Video Effects

UChromaKey Allows for the possibility of a green screen effect. It features fullscreen effects and the ability to add chromakey to materials that are lit or unlit. It also includes camera source handling. It is a good addition to a game that may want to incorporate a type of augmented reality or a fun Photo Booth option. The opportunities with chromakey in mobile games are not completely explored and could potentially allow for some interesting and engaging user experiences.

Price

Supported Platforms

Category

$10

Video Effects

Sometimes a normal video is not enough. Developers might want to add creative effects to videos in games. Video Glitches is not the usual video plugin that simply allows for video playback or video ads. This plugin allows videos and scenes in games to look purposely messed up. It reminds me of this video when the pc bot tries to wake up again in the end. This plugin can be used to simulate messed up video transmissions or display a view from the perspective of a broken camera. The possible uses for this plugin are up to the developer – ideal for a Sci-Fi or Horror game.

Price

Supported Platforms

Category

$25

Video Streaming

This plugin allows users to view YouTube videos within a game. It will return an .mp4 video that can be displayed wherever the developer chooses in the app. It allows video searching functionality. Users can search for videos, channels, and set category filters. This is useful if you want to incorporate funny videos and extra interesting content into your game.

Price

Supported Platforms

Category

Free

Video Ads

AdColony prides themself on their .13 second load time for ads. They serve video ads that can be integrated in games to reward users. Video ads served with AdColony have the highest retention rate on Android. Many developers have a strong incentive to advertise with video ads. Users that come to a game from a video ad are 13% more likely to be retained and twice as likely to make a purchase when compared to other users. Video ads have the potential to make developers millions of dollars. Crossy Road made 1 million dollars in only 45 days in video ads. They have since made a total of over 10 million dollars.

Price

Supported Platforms

Category

Free

Video Ads

Vungle serves personalized video ads to different users. According to their website, no two users should be exposed to the same ads. Vungle focuses on creative ad serving with a specialty around rewarded ads. Rewarded ads are a good opportunity to keep users engaged in a game while rewarding them with resources to continue playing. Integrating Vungle in your game will give you an opportunity to monetize by giving other companies exposure. Moreover, they can also help you obtain users if you choose to advertise with them. Ads in mobile games for other mobile games are more likely to be clicked than ads for other products.

Price

Supported Platforms

Category

Free

Video Ads

A data report by AppsFlyer in May 2015, found that AppLovin has the highest performance in 30 day user retention on iOS. Applovin’s high quality video advertisements encourage users to stay for longer periods of time. They pay developers only 15 days after each month. Moreover, AppLovin provides developers a dashboard that shows information on ad delivery in real time. This will in turn, allow developers to efficiently deliver ads.

The term “video” in relation to mobile games is vague. However, videos are an integral part of mobile and platform games. Developers should include videos in their game whether they are in the form of ads, live camera recordings, or funny YouTube cat videos.Videos improve user engagement and provide interesting and memorable user experiences. Not to mention they will contribute to a game’s “stickiness” factor as they retain and obtain users.

More and more remarkable social networks for games are rising, offering a great variety of features to help developers maximize the revenue of their game by increasing retention, engagement and virality. Yet, most of us only know about Facebook.
To make it easier, we have created a list reviewing 10 Unity SDKs and their features:

Many of you have heard the term SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization. This term mostly refers to optimizing the search results of Google, but in reality so many things nowadays are search driven. One of these things is the Unity Asset Store.

Keywords make a big difference

It’s sometimes hard to believe that something this small could be so important, but that’s the reality of search driven discovery. Unless your package is so well known that developers will look for your brand name, your main way to get discovered is through search. Now, lets consider these search phrases:

Beep sound effect

Beep sound FX

Beep SFX

Go ahead, you can try them on the asset store. Pay special attention to two packages:

Universal Sound FX

Spearhead Sound Effects

When searching for “effects” versus “fx” in the term, the package that has that keyword in the name floats higher, although they are semantically identical and the Universal Sound FX has a 5 start rating from 212 people compared to a 4 star rating from 5 people. This gets worse when you get to the last term “beep sfx” – search results do not even present the highly popular Universal Sound FX package.

How do Unity Asset Store search results work?

While this is all very interesting, can you actually do something about it? The answer is YES. There is actually quite a lot you can do. Let’s first understand what happened in the example above. The search engine looks at 3 things to find keywords:

Package name

Description

Package content (this is top secret so don’t tell anyone)

If we look back at the results from the small test we did, you can clearly see the impact of the name. However, when we were looking for the term “beep sfx” – none of the names actually contained the term. Now remember that the engine does not know that “sfx” really means “sound effects” or “sound fx”. It keeps looking in both packages for the term “sfx” to see if the package should be included. None of the descriptions contain the term so the search engine becomes disappointed and turns to the package content to see if the term can be found there. It joyfully realizes that the “Spearhead Sound Effects” package has all the sounds named SFX, so it includes that package in the search results.

Discovering what words users search

By now you are probably convinced that you should include every possible word in the universe in the description or the package content to rank for everything. That’s not recommended, of course. So, if your package is an aggregation of 100 sounds, including a word for every one of them will make the description unreadable for humans and might lead Unity to reject your package. Instead, try to find the top 5-10 words that represent 80% of the search volume. Unity will not give you this information, but you can actually use the Google AdWords tool to predict that. There is a special tool called Keyword Planner that is highly useful to figure out search trends and understands how people think when they are searching for something. Try running the following list in that tool. You should select “Get ad group and keyword ideas” in the first step and click on the “keyword ideas” tab once you get to the results page. Try these terms:

beep sound effect

beep sound fx

beep sfx

The results are surprising because “beep sound effect” is a much more popular search term.

You can also use the same method to determine what sound names you should include. Let’s try this list:

beep sound effect

blip sound effect

blop sound effect

explosion sound effect

swosh sound effect

swish sound effect

ding sound effect

tada sound effect

button sound effect

attack sound effect

warp sound effect

coin sound effect

roar sound effect

In terms of popularity, we can clearly see that the explosion, the ding, and the beep stand out.

Focus on words that are right for your package

As you may have realized by now, these are very powerful techniques that can double and triple your downloads. However, you should be mindful of what happens once users download your package. If you optimize for explosion sounds and your package doesn’t include those sounds you are going to get bad reviews and might even find yourself banned from the Unity Asset Store. The idea is to help users reach your package when they are looking for things that you actually have.

The wait is finally over! We’re happy to announce that the first Complete Soomla Template is now available on the Unity Asset Store or, if you want to test it first, in the Google Play Store. Our innovative friends at Spartonix did a great job developing this plugin that is one-of-a-kind. It’s one of the most helpful Soomla tools out there because it is a complete project template that showcases all features in Store and Profile. The template includes:

Soomla Store:

Currencies (coins)

Single use goods

Single use packs

Lifetime goods

Equipable goods

Upgradable goods

Currency packs

Refresh inventory

Restore purchases

Soomla Profile (with Facebook, Twitter, and Google+):

Login/Logout

Share status/story

Like

Invite

Upload Image

Rate App

Get Feed

Get Contacts

Soomla Grow Integration:

There’s also an added bonus of integrating our new dashboard which is a data platform for community-driven analytics and benchmarks. All you have to do is register in the dashboard, get your keys, and then you’re good to go!

This is a great plugin for all developers because for the low cost of $15 all Soomla features will be seamlessly integrated into your app. It’s a high quality plugin for game developers that want to quickly replicate these features in their games.

Build Commercial Unity Plugins with Soomla

Soomla is devoted to providing free and open source technology for indie developers. All of our code is released under the Apache license, which is very permissive and liberal with respect to commercial re-distributions. This means that developers are allowed, moreover encouraged, to make reuse of our software for their own paid Unity plugins, no questions asked. Creating Soomla-powered plugins for aspects such as virtual economies, social interaction and level design, will serve the community and the Unity Asset Store. The more tools our community has, the larger it’ll grow to fulfill our mission of standardizing game development. We were thrilled when Spartonix wanted to work with us and create our second plugin in the Unity Asset Store. We also have another project in the works with a Studio in the UK using LevelUp.

We’d like to give a big thanks to our friends at Spartonix and encourage all developers to download the plugin now for ease of use. Make sure to check out our forum to see what the community has to say about it!

The Unity Asset Store has over 15,000 assets now and is averaging about half a million downloads per month. With so much activity, there is no doubt that some developers are using it to make money. One developer claimed he was making $10,000 a month at some point – here is his story. We also have a good relationship with Unity experts Rebound Games, who are doing quite well on the Asset Store, and I think it’s safe to say they’re making a nice living from it.

One of the interesting topics is how to choose a price for your package. There are 4 basic strategies. Here are the merits of each one:

Giving assets for free

If your main goal is to make a name for yourself as a good developer and an expert in Unity, you might consider uploading your assets for free. It’s a great way to get recognized while giving back to the community. If you are a game development studio who is looking for a way to get paid projects – this could be a good way. At SOOMLA, we are an open source company so our packages are free by nature.

Charging money for the asset package

This is pretty straight forward – once you submit your package to the Unity Asset Store, you can set a price for it. Obviously, the higher the price will be the less people will want to pay it. It’s a good practice to look at similar packages and compare prices. If there are other developers offering the same content, you might consider pricing lower to undercut them or pricing higher to position yourself as a premium content provider. it is also a good idea to periodically drop the price completely or give a discount to create buzz around your package.

Implement a freemium model with two packages

While the asset store doesn’t have an in-app purchase option for packages, it does allow you to upload two packages with a limited and extended feature set. This technique has been mastered in the early days of the Apple App Store. In the Unity Asset Store, the packages from the same provider are being presented to the user next to each other and so many users will realize that only the premium package includes the features they want. The key here is to implement enough functionality for beginners in the free package. This way you enjoy the buzz and the visibility of a popular free package while still having a way to make money.

Using a loss leader to increase visibility

If your paid package is too niche, you might want to consider creating another package that targets the same developers and price it for free. This technique is often called loss leader in the retail world. The purpose of the loss leader is to appeal to a wider audience and get them in the door so they will discover other products. Since the Unity Asset Stores presents packages from the same developer in the related items section, this will increase the visibility of your paid package.